Gormenghast
Gormenghast
#1Gormenghast
Posted: 7/2/15 at 10:12pm
Has anyone else other than me read this book series, seen the short-lived BBC television adaptation, or the rarely produced stage play (and never-produced opera)? I don't know why- some people find it insufferable, pretentious and tortuous, but I couldn't get enough of the macabre, decadent dourness of the Gormenghast universe and its peculiar characters.
The only trouble is, Gormenghast has become more famous as a metaphor for an insular, bizarre and somewhat redundant world than as the piece of literature that inspired it. So nobody I know has read it- and the one person I convinced to read it handed it back to me a week later, saying "this is worse than cancer" (direct quote).
That said, the Off-Topic board here tends to be kind of erudite, so I figured I'd bring it up here. (That, and I'm temporarily shadowbanned from posting on Reddit due to sharing the same IP address with a porn performer who spammed the site with her pictures.) Any Gormenghast acolytes on BWW?
Roscoe
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/15/03
#2Gormenghast
Posted: 7/3/15 at 7:28am
I've read TITUS GROAN, the first novel in Mervyn Peake's series, two times and enjoyed it thoroughly, a fascinating big chunk of weirdness that had me amazed all the way through. I've never been able to get very far with the second novel, but maybe that will change -- it can't hope to replicate the shock of encountering that world for the first time, it just feels like more of the same somehow.
You have to have the temperament to dig on big weird books with lots of strangeness and not a lot of plot. GAME OF THRONES it ain't. It's a big fascinating chunk of novel, like Kafka and Dickens had some kind of bastard child -- characters with names like Prunesquallor and Rottcodd and Swelter and Steerpike and Fuschia, and the Countess of Groan moves about the castle surrounded by an ocean of white cats whose loud purring announces her arrival, it's mostly about these people interacting with each other. There is a plot in there somewhere, as a young man from the kitchens, Steerpike, starts his unprecedented climb through the social strata of Gormenghast, looking for power and destruction, and things get messy before the novel's end.
It's a big treat to read.
I tried to watch the BBC series, and found it under-produced and over-acted somehow, the world never quite came to life as a reality, it was a bunch of actors strutting and screaming and being Terribly Eccentric while wearing Peake-inspired latex makeup. The magic didn't happen.
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick
My blog: http://www.roscoewrites.blogspot.com/
#3Gormenghast
Posted: 7/3/15 at 10:52amI came to appreciate the show, if not as the perfect adaptation, at least as an interesting look at the world Peake described in primarily unpictureable ways. The show comes across, visually and stylistically, as a proto-Harry Potter "wizarding world."
#4Gormenghast
Posted: 7/4/15 at 6:10pm
Thank you for reminding me what a wonderful time I had being lost in the weird and wonderful world of Gormenghast [tv].
Maybe now is my time to revisit-this time the book.
#5Gormenghast
Posted: 7/4/15 at 10:21pm
The novel- well, books one and two of the trilogy- feels like a musical that hasn't been written and probably couldn't be. I like to think about who could compose music and lyrics for a world and a show like that...
